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Images from the collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis
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In 1991, when two St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters came out with the book Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty, Bill Knoedelseder saw the cover and groaned. “Dammit!” he muttered, flipping pages. “I always wanted to write this book.” He’d worked 12 years for the Los Angeles Times; he knew what made a good story. And the story of the Busch family and its beer empire was the most interesting, colorful, dramatic story in his hometown of St. Louis.
He read a little. Yep. Authors Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey had set the bar on reporting about Adolphus and August. Knoedelseder kept flipping, moving toward the end. Then he brightened. There was no real ending. They’d had to deliver a book, but the story wasn’t over.
He would wait.
He produced FOX Entertainment News and became vice president of news for USA Broadcasting. He used material he’d gathered at the L.A. Times to write two books. Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia included his source in the federal witness protection program, which unnerved the FBI. I’m Dying Up Here, about the golden era of stand-up comedy in L.A., helped ease the feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman and got optioned for a movie.
And in 2008, InBev, a merged Belgian company now controlled by three Brazilian billionaires, took over Anheuser-Busch, the last of the big family-owned American breweries. Knoedelseder now had his ending. And behind it stretched an arc of nearly 150 years of American history, from an immigrant’s dream to a global colossus.
“As A-B went, so did the country,” Knoedelseder says. His voice changes, his habitual amusement replaced by something more like awe. “It was a story you could tell through human beings, but it was about something bigger. It was about us.”
St. Louis’ Rockefellers
Knoedelseder had already started his research when he found out that the sale of A-B had prompted somebody else to write a book, too. He wasn’t worried long; Julie MacIntosh, his sources told him, was asking entirely different questions than he was. “She reported the living shit out of the financial details,” he says. “I didn’t care about that stuff.”
MacIntosh’s book, titled Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon, came out in 2010. By then, Knoedelseder was in close touch with members of the Busch family. (That was the advantage of growing up in St. Louis: There’s seldom more than one degree of separation between you and anybody you want to meet.)
Adolphus Busch, son of Gussie and uncle to August IV, “was very cooperative,” Knoedelseder says. “He’s fairly accessible. He’s a regular guy.” Trudy Busch, now in her eighties, also spoke candidly, saying Gussie “was the first man I made love with. I’d never had sex before.” Billy Busch talked about growing up on Grant’s Farm, about the inner workings of the family, about the death of his little sister.
“This was the first time anyone has had any cooperation from inside the immediate family,” Knoedelseder says. “The so-called ‘scandals’ had been covered in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—and sometimes things were treated like scandals and they weren’t—but the Busches never spoke about what it was like inside the family when all that was going on. They were suspicious of the media, and it became a vicious circle, because if you don’t open yourself up to the media, they have to guess at what you are. They have to go with the cardboard cutout. It’s easy to look at Busches as rich people and think they are not like the rest of us. But they really kind of are.”
Except, perhaps, at their most tragic extremes. August IV did not talk to Knoedelseder, but the writer penetrated the Fourth’s inner circle of friends. “And as I’m writing the book, all the other stuff happened—whoa,”
he says. “The dead girl in the bed.”
He learned every possible detail of every tragedy and triumph, using the advantage of time. Friends and neighbors spoke far more freely, because “the Busches are now just very rich people. They don’t control a company. People were not afraid.”
He used the fresh details not for prurience, but to tell the larger American story. And once he had its historic sweep, he came in closer, determined to give readers the sense of St. Louis that’s missing from previous writing about the Busches. “One of the reasons the Busch family is not more familiar to Americans is that they were in St. Louis,” he remarks. “Adolphus was like Hearst, like Rockefeller.”
After the brewery sale, it riled Knoedelseder to read quotes from investment bankers “about what a bunch of yahoos St. Louisans were. People have no idea what St. Louis is. They don’t realize this was at one time one of the greatest cities. Its decline started with Prohibition: That knocked St. Louis on its ass. The Busches managed to keep their brewery working, making other things. And when Prohibition ended, nobody was in a position to challenge them.”
Sons of Busches
Knoedelseder’s new book opens dramatically, with August Busch IV unable to complete a speech to a crowd of 500 beer distributors. It was less than a month before the InBev takeover.
The story’s real beginning—where Knoedelseder moves after his attention-grabbing opening—was Adolphus Busch, one of 22 children born to a wine merchant in Kastel, Germany. When he arrived in America, the national drink was whiskey. “Adolphus figured out: ‘Wait a minute, this could be a beer-drinking nation,’” Knoedelseder says. “He was more of an industrialist than a brewer. Beer had always been very local, not even regional. You sold beer in your neighborhood, and you didn’t piss off your workers, because they were your customers. Adolphus figured out how to go national.”
He was a genius at promotion as well as distribution. Knoedelseder’s favorite example is Adolphus spotting a painting, Custer’s Last Fight, and having it reproduced smaller, with more blood and scalpings, to hang in taverns. “Think about that. This is a guy who came from Germany, and not 15 years after that familiar battle, he sees this huge picture painted on the back of a bar in a saloon that’s going broke. He acquires it and figures something about this will connect with people. So he distributes it to bars everywhere. It doesn’t say Budweiser on it anywhere, just Anheuser-Busch at the bottom. No encouragement to buy, no picture of a beer bottle, nothing. It was a brilliant example of associative advertising. And that became part of the company’s DNA: their ability to know what connects with people.”
Adolphus’ heir was August Anheuser Busch, regularly called Auggie by St. Louisans he didn’t know, but referred to as August A. by the family. Knoedelseder describes him as “more country squire than hard-charging industrialist.” He built the chateau at Grant’s Farm; he founded the Bridlespur Hunt Club. “But when his father died in 1913, right as Prohibition was coming, it fell to him to save the company. He inherited a beer company just as the brewery was legislated out of existence.”
August A. managed to keep the company alive—and 2,000 people employed—by making rail cars, ice cream, a malt-based soft drink called Bevo, and the barley malt syrup and baker’s yeast that lawbreakers then used to make their own damn beer. Finally, the ban ended. Knoedelseder paints the triumphant scene of April 1933: a bright-red coach parading down Pennsylvania Avenue, drawn by a team of perfectly matched Clydesdales with white ribbons braided into their manes, to present President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a crate of Anheuser-Busch beer.
The following year, his health destroyed by heart disease and gout, August A. wrote a note—“Goodbye precious mama and adorable children”—and shot himself. He was 68. He left a personal fortune of $3.5 million, a farthing compared to Adolphus’ $60 million. But the company was profitable again, and its competition had been decimated. At the end of the 1800s, there had been close to 4,000 little breweries across America. By the end of Prohibition, there were fewer than 200.
The Alpha Busch
“Very quickly, there were three world powers: Pabst, Schlitz, and A-B,” Knoedelseder says. He chronicles the bitter fights, through the years, for top-dog position. He also shows how “A-B’s message became part of the American lexicon, part of pop culture.” The Clydesdales in snow came to mean something deep and real and gratifying;
so did the Dalmatians on the fire wagon.
And then there was the best advertising of all: the Cardinals. “You cannot tell the history of St. Louis without the history of the Busch family, the history of the brewery, and the history of the Cardinals,” Knoedelseder remarks. “It’s all one story.”
August A.’s son Gussie took over the brewery in 1946. In 1953, he bought the Cardinals—not because he loved baseball, but because it was a way to beat brewery rival Milwaukee, take local broadcasting rights away from the Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, and turn Sportsman’s Park into, in Knoedelseder’s words, “a giant outdoor tavern.” Gussie soon became synonymous with the team. Knoedelseder re-creates the famous scene at the first spring training when Gussie asked, “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play? Hell, we sell beer to everyone.”
“Gussie was the alpha Busch. He was unbridled in his appetites,” Knoedelseder says with feeling. “A notorious Lothario, a barroom brawler, a f—k-you kind of guy. When he took over the company, they were concerned: ‘Holy Jesus, now we’ve got Gussie!’ He was vindictive. But he was also amazingly charismatic and wonderful good fun, and probably the best beer salesman that ever lived. He ate life up by giant spoonfuls.”
The family’s earthy, lusty personality blossomed during Gussie’s reign. “There is a history of family food fights,” Knoedelseder observes. “At the Ritz, during a food fight after the Cardinals had lost a baseball game, a lawyer standing next to Gussie said, ‘I’m just wondering, Mr. Busch, what you do when you win.’ Well, when they win, they take the fire extinguishers off the wall and blast people as they come off the elevator.” Knoedelseder’s laughing. “There’s a lot to admire there.”
Trouble Brewing
The tragedies are all here, too: the deaths and shootings and sex scandals. Knoedelseder writes movingly about Gussie’s adored 8-year-old daughter, Christina, killed in an auto accident when he was 75, and his subsequent breakdown. The book also details the coup that finally ousted Gussie—although its terms remained a secret for 15 years—and divided the family’s allegiances.
August III was the son of Gussie and Elizabeth. “His parents broke up when he was 5, and he never really lived with his father again,” Knoedelseder says. “When [August III] was a teenager, Gussie fell in love with Trudy, who was the same age as August III’s sister Lotsie. So the Third was not part of the Busch family that lived at Grant’s Farm. He was the older uncle to those seven kids. He was the one expected to take over the company, but the entire time, Gussie would tell everyone, ‘It’s not a given. He’s got to prove himself every day.’ Gussie wanted to die in the director’s chair, and he was very hard on his son.”
The public story was that Gussie stepped aside. “It was a palace coup,” says Knoedelseder. Gussie fell apart in 1974 on the Feast of St. Nicholas, when his youngest daughter, Christina, was fatally injured in a car crash. “He started drinking really, really heavily; he was doing crazy stuff at the brewery; and August III went to people on the board and explained everything. It looked like dementia had set in. It wasn’t quite that. The board, after years of rubber-stamping every whim, voted him out, and he lost it for a while.
“There was this great scene where the four Grant’s Farm brothers went to meet August III at the fence that separates the two pieces of property in St. Peters, Waldmeister and Belleau, the shooting farm,” Knoedelseder continues. “August IV was 10, standing in the background. And they had a confrontation over what August III had done. ‘How could you do this to him so soon after Christina died?’ It just split the family completely.” He pauses. “They will all now admit that absolutely, August III did the right thing.”
August IV’s next crisis came in 1983, when he was 19. Any St. Louisan over that age already knows the gist: He crashed his Corvette on a tight curve of road in Tucson, Ariz., killing his passenger, a gorgeous 22-year-old waitress, Michele Frederick. He then, it seemed, walked away from the scene in a daze. He was found hours later lying on his bed, covered in dried blood. He was taken to the hospital, but by the time police got a warrant to obtain his urine and blood samples, the urine sample had been lost, and the blood was no longer testable for alcohol.
That left Pima County authorities without any physical evidence that August IV was under the influence at the time of the accident. They closed the case and filed no charges.
Back in St. Louis, very little appeared about the young woman, and her easily available yearbook photo was never run in the paper. Knoedelseder interviewed the lead investigator and Frederick’s classmates and neighbors. “She definitely got lost in the shuffle,” he says. “How much of that was the fact that the parents wouldn’t talk? I’m sure that had a lot to do with it. You don’t have a quote to run. It could have been purely sexist—although it’s hard to imagine some reporter wouldn’t want to go find out more about this pretty blonde. What do I guess? My guess is that Fleishman-Hillard did their thing to downplay it.”
The next scandal came two years later, when the Fourth was speeding home after an evening at PT’s in Sauget, Ill. Undercover drug detectives tried several times to stop his Mercedes-Benz; he led them on a high-speed chase, and it took a bullet in a tire to stop him. The officers involved told Knoedelseder what was said in the police car and at the station, and explained that many of the incident’s details had been reported incorrectly because they weren’t allowed to talk at the time.
After 1985, things quieted for a time. August IV cared deeply about the brewery, Knoedelseder believes. “But he didn’t mix easily with customers. He didn’t have that fire. I think he was basically shy. He learned that being a Busch helped him; it drew people to him so he didn’t have to go out and make the connection and sell people. He was presold when he walked in the room. But he had issues, which came out big-time but were smoothed over and covered up and described as ‘playboy.’” Knoedelseder snorts. “What an archaic word. What does that mean? Hugh Hefner? This wasn’t Playboy stuff. That’s kind of winking at it.”
The King’s Castle
Knoedelseder took his first trip to Grant’s Farm with his cousins when he was 9 or 10. From that day on, the place was seared into his brain: riding the train through the deer park, with the buffalo and deer coming right up to you. The chateau in the misty distance, one of his cousins pointing to it, and another hissing, “Yeah, that’s where Gussie lives.” The place felt like a story, like the movies he used to come home and act out, scene by scene, in his family’s little white house in Bissell Hills.
As an adult, he was even more fascinated by Grant’s Farm: “It was a castle, but seven children grew up there. What was that like?” His favorite bit of research for the book was his tour of the chateau: “Gussie’s closet in his bedroom—all those crazy cowboy hats and Budweiser-red sport coats—it’s just the way he left it. The way his father left it. Adolphus’ barber chair is in the middle of the marble bathroom!”
When August A. had the mansion built, its design vocabulary cribbed from the French Renaissance, it was “easily the grandest residence in the state of Missouri.” It had 34 rooms and was surrounded by 281 acres. In Gussie’s era, those acres would be populated by llamas, camels, monkeys, peacocks, grizzly bears, and a baby elephant—and opened to the public.
The house remained off-limits, though, the youngest Busch children’s lives imagined from afar. After talking to Billy Busch, Knoedelseder came away with the sense that life at Grant’s Farm “was magical, it was privileged, but it was not easy. They were not idle spoiled children; they had to work their asses off. You are living on a piece of property that has 300 wild animals. The chore possibilities are endless.”
Originally, Knoedelseder had intended to confine his story to the five men who shaped the brewery, and the hypermasculine shooting, drinking, and womanizing culture that shaped them. But when he realized how easily Trudy had been dismissed at the outset (a 1952 St. Louis Globe-Democrat headline read “August A. Busch Will Marry Swiss Girl Today”)—and how formidable a force she’d become at Grant’s Farm—he changed his mind.
She was the queen of St. Louis’ Camelot. “Famous people from all over the world came to Gussie’s castle and were entertained,” says Knoedelseder. “Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Ed McMahon, Andy Williams, Danny Kaye, President Harry S. Truman. And Trudy was in charge of hospitality.”
He chuckles, remembering their conversation: “She’s telling me about meeting Gussie in Germany and then coming to America because he wanted to marry her, never mind the fact that he was 27 years older and married at the time. He brings her on a private train to St. Louis, and she sees this kingdom he has, how he tells everyone what to do. She said, ‘I found it very sexy.’”
She bore Gussie seven children, and it was she who took care of all the discipline. “She’d smack ’em with whatever she had in her hand. Gussie didn’t believe in corporal punishment, but boy, she believed in it wholeheartedly,” Knoedelseder says. “But she’d also stop in each bedroom every night and say their prayers with them.”
Billy was the last to leave Grant’s Farm: “They had to dynamite him out of there.” He loved the animals—he still brings his kids back regularly—and he loved learning how to make beer. As he told Knoedelseder, “Our father led us to believe that the business and the family were one and the same.”
The Next Era
The brewery was sold on July 13, 2008. It was, however trite the phrase may seem, the end of an era. Two years later, another young woman, Adrienne Martin, was found dead after sharing the company of August IV. “It’s almost too much,” says Knoedelseder. “And it’s still playing out. Her parents are suing. Her ex-husband sued, and August really quickly agreed to it. They were friends, they were buddies, and it wasn’t a very high amount: $1.5 million. The parents then file a lawsuit saying they should be taken into consideration. And that’s where they are right now.”
Shocking details from Martin’s death have been all over the media; Knoedelseder reveals equally shocking material from the year that led up to it. The images are disturbing—and heart-wrenching.
“I got pretty close to his inner circle,” Knoedelseder says, “and there’s no one who will say that he’s a bad guy. He was congenial. You can’t find anyone to say he was an asshole.” You can, however, find friends who will say they don’t expect him to live long.
That would be a dismal close—if the book ended there. Instead, it ends with another beginning: Billy Busch’s new Kräftig beer company.
“He’s Adolphus stepping off the boat again,” Knoedelseder says, excitement back in his voice. “Gussie left them all a shitpile of stock, and most of them diversified. Billy didn’t sell a share, and when InBev bought him out, he made millions.” He used it to start a new brewery, its signature beer given the German word for “powerful.”
“He doesn’t have to do this,” Knoedelseder notes. “He could be happy playing polo.”
But he’s a Busch.
Meet Bill Knoedelseder
The Knoedelseders were middle-class in midcentury mid-America, and their son Bill came to know the Busches the way most St. Louisans did: as cardboard cutouts. Their first names were hard to keep straight; they were crude and macho and had food fights. Every once in a while, one of them fired a gun or crashed a car, and somebody died. The rest of the time, they made beer, and beer was as close as a regular man came to sipping the nectar of the gods.
Bill was wild, in the days when wild meant buying a six-pack for his big sister and her friends and slipping it through her dorm window at Maryville College. His McBride High School yearbook showed him in a snazzy white tux jacket with his career ambition printed below: “To be the president of Budweiser.” At Mizzou, he drank a whole lot of what he’d vowed to produce, taking five years to realize he didn’t want to write advertising copy. (“It was Mad Men, all the Alka-Seltzer commercials… It seemed to be cool, but I hated it.”)
Studying English at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, he got serious and got A’s. His writing prof, Don Crinklaw, later became editor of St. Louis Magazine and gave him a few assignments. One became a classic: “Confessions of a Maitre D’.” (Knoedelseder didn’t name his employer; it was Tony’s.)
These were optimistic times: He and his first wife sold everything and went to Europe. When they returned, he worked as an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote about nobodies, like a young director named Steven Spielberg. He wrote an exposé of racism on Days of Our Lives and started digging for more news nobody wanted told: comics on strike, money-laundering, soured contracts…
He knew it was working when he made a call and heard a voice mutter, “Oh shit, it’s Knoedelseder.”
His “Lou Grant” was editor Irv Letofsky: “His sense of humor was so droll and dry, and I completely got it, and nobody else did. ‘Don’t be nervous about these people,’ he told me. ‘They sing a little better than we do, they dance a little better than we do, but by and large, they’re pretty much scum like everybody else.’”
But it was his next mentor, Barry Diller, then CEO of FOX, who taught him the ways of power. Knoedelseder left the L.A. Times at Diller’s behest, to produce hard-hitting entertainment news for FOX. “They had a red phone in my office, and the only person who called on that line was Diller. I’d say hello and he’d say, ‘What was that?’ On the first anniversary, he sent us a bottle of Cristal champagne with a note: ‘Billy and staff: Congrats on your first year. I’m almost proud of you.’”
